‘Dornford Yates’ was the pen-name of novelist William Mercer, 1885–1960. Of all the authors whose fiction has got about my wits, none has tempted me so clamorously to find out about his factual life.

D J Taylor: Fiction, Feminism & Fake Vicars - A Bite of the Apple: A Life with Books, Writers and Virago by Lennie Goodings ...

David Gelber: Heroic Work in a Very Important Field - Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times by Phillipa K Chong ...

Western Europe is in the grip of a cultural illness that is sapping its will to live, claims Douglas Murray in this hard-hitting polemic. Unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from the ...

Anyone seeking the sources of the extraordinary and dark imagination shown in John Burnside’s fiction and poetry should read this memoir of his childhood and adolescence. It is, above all, a portrait ...

Ian McEwan’s shift, fully twenty years ago now, from the unique impassive weirdness of his first novels and story collections towards a sleek if never quite untroubling respectability won him legions ...

All the more reason, then, to welcome the first major, comprehensive biography of Turin’s wise and gentle chemist. In setting out to write it, Myriam Anissimov has sought to place this incomparable ...

In 1930, Jack Kahane, a tall gangling Englishman who favoured Savile Row suits, a monocle and cane, launched an unlikely publishing venture in Paris. The early signs were not propitious. He had no ...

February is the month when the Public Lending Right computers eventually produce the sums they have been mulling over since June. The result is that 17,594 registered authors share between them the ...

David Sexton: Agnostic Faith - Wallace Stevens: The Critical Heritage by Charles Doyle; The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens: An Interpretative Study by Rajeev S Patke ...

In early 1942 the German war machine was engaged in a deadly race against the Allies to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Central to this effort was the remote experimental plant at Vemork in ...

Jeremy Lewis: Those Inky Scoundrels - More Matter: Essays and Criticism by John Updike ...